


What you want and what you need

by Riemann_integrable



Category: La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac
Genre: Angst, Historical Inaccuracy, I mean the TF, M/M, Scars, Sexual Content, Splendeurs, Violence, homosexuality discussed in a context where it wasn't really conceptualized, mentions of Vautrin/Lucien, specifically mentions of killing methods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:53:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27420751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riemann_integrable/pseuds/Riemann_integrable
Summary: At Rochefort, Madeleine was chained to Jaques Collin in more ways than one.
Relationships: Théodore Calvi/Vautrin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 4





	What you want and what you need

Theodore didn’t kill the way one usually did — and Jaques fancied himself quite experienced on the subject. He was quick,  _ very _ quick, and most witnesses would have described it as impulsive, so suddenly did he come down with the blade. (Theodore liked throat-cutting, garroting, strangling, anything that went for the neck, either by personal taste or as a sarcastic reference to execution methods.) One of the first questions Jaques had posited him upon their shared permanence at Rochefort was how he’d gone about the murders that landed him there.

“Eleven,” he had said, “with a face like that?”

He never asked about the  _ why _ , only the  _ how _ . Theodore took note of it. Those were events he could describe with the neutrality of a hunter strolling home with a couple of pheasants under his arm. There was a poetry to it, how naturally he took it all, Jaques could read its metric where most people couldn’t.

That, besides, had to do with the peculiarity of Theodore’s methods. He killed by instinct, but coldly, without ever losing an ounce of serenity. If he had to bleed someone out by the jugular for any reason, then it was a rock-solid certainty in his mind, a fact as unquestioned as a monk’s faith. 

“The old man made no sound, silent as a fish. But his moll was home, and the daughter and the maid, and they wouldn’t stop yammering so they had to go.”

Theodore had blinked slowly, lashes heavy under the sharp angle of his browline, at the satisfied smile Jaques gave him from the other side of the cell. He continued.

“Dropped them all in the net with some rocks. They never found them at the sea bottom, I don’t think. Took them a month to even declare them dead.”

“No blood?” Jaques Collin had tilted his head, greatly humored.

“No blood. I took the sheets with me.”

The mystery of how they’d gotten chained together was one yet to disembroil for Theodore himself. As it was a rare phenomenon to have your chainmate switched out, the sensible conclusion was that someone — with enough cash on them — had arranged for it, except he couldn’t think of anyone with reason enough. It was Jaques’s doing, he knew deep down. He’d heard the story a million times, how Trompe-la-Mort was with pretty-faced young men around his age, the legends about his first imprisonment and some handsome Italian gambler; plausible, yet it confounded him firstly because he and Jaques didn’t know each other. 

Really, anything he could have learned about Theodore before their paths crossed so significantly in that cell, was looks, and that he wasn’t called ‘Madeleine’ for nothing. And he remembered, too, seeing that burly man in the courtyard with the odd, brick-red hair and the vivid eyes; that he was warned every time he cast him a glance,  _ that devil can cheat anyone, even death, you don’t want to cross him _ . Fair enough, Theodore didn’t need to look at Jaques a lot more to understand the sorcery. He almost believed it himself. Initially he would have hardly called the other a ‘devil’ or monster of any variety — on contrary, he came across as pleasant, educated and polite so convincingly that Madeleine would have taken the risk of trusting only him in all Rochefort and distrusting everyone else.

Jaques killed in a calculated way. Often not absent from sentiment, with an outright savage fury, but such factors were accounted for in the grand scheme, something one could perhaps call an extraordinary self-awareness. He enjoyed  _ control _ , needed to exercise it over both himself and everything around him, to make his world a collection of toys to amuse himself with. His own outbursts and decisions taken out of passion weren’t exempt from this higher view. But he hid it well and — as for any masterful illusion — it only revealed its cruel falsity when it was broken, so that the play’s characters took full enjoyment in the events until the curtains were drawn.

In a sense, Theodore had already known himself to be a puppet the moment the two of them were conducted to the cell with a brand new pair of manacles.

During the first days Jaques Collin didn’t do anything. He was calm, jovial in his better moments, but the words uttered in this tranquility weren’t many; all he did was stare, insistent and fond, at the young Corsican whose right ankle was connected to his left. It was a silent meditation they shared in the unsanitary filth of the small space allotted to them both. They would sit at the two opposing walls, face to face, with some discomfort caused by the limited range of the chain. 

Madeleine would do those minute tics, the ones he got when he was annoyed. Jaques couldn’t help but find them charming, even though dealing with this boy was like taking in a stray from the streets of a worse neighbourhood. Theodore Calvi was, in this analogy, almost certainly rabid. But oh, he was also more beautiful than most women, an argument that was known to have the same effect on Trompe-la-Mort’s common sense as a bottle of liquor. 

“You had me brought here to look?” Theodore spat when the thread of his patience finally snapped. “You ought to have come to the  _ quartier des tantes _ and wasted less money.”

“Wasted,” Jaques eyed him from head to toe, “it was certainly not, my little Madeleine.”

“ _ Yours _ , now.”

Jaques Collin merely lifted his left foot to rattle the chain and shrugged his shoulders, which all of the sudden rendered Theodore too tired to argue. The next time he spoke, several hours had gone by — or so it seemed, for the passing of time in such places was strenuous to follow. 

“I could shoot you.” Madeleine nodded his cellmate’s way, intimidating, as though he knew exactly how icy his blue eyes were. Jaques suddenly felt bewitched by something more than his fine features.

“Then I’m in luck; that’s not your way of killing, is it. You’re a garroter, I’ve heard.” He made a swift gesture of slitting across his own throat.

“And what are you?” Theodore realized he’d sounded like he was trying to make conversation and quickly added; “Swindler?”

“I shoot,” Jaques threw the ball back at him.

He waited for the retort to take its effect.

“But I wouldn't shoot  _ you.  _ It’d be my only true crime to deprive the world of you.”

*

Placing Jaques Collin physically close to Madeleine left no doubts about what a Colossus of a man he was, how he had twice the shoulder width and so much beef packed onto him he could engulf Theodore like some ruinous landslide. He nearly did; or at least that’s how it would have appeared through the narrow window of the cell door. Madeleine was consistently  _ almost convinced _ — the large hand sliding across his torso did it, the way Jaques traced out the contour of each muscle like this wasn’t a chore even though he was very evidently getting hard. His face was pressed against his cellmate’s shoulder as if he smelled anything other than disgusting. Then he pulled away and Theodore felt barely a pang of heartbreak when he only deigned the front of his breeches with a light touch.

“Turn around,” said Jaques, simply and cryptically.

“You don’t want to look at the branding.” Theodore laughed bitterly at his face and at the collapse of this delusion — though he began turning around.

With an air of superiority quite typical of him, Trompe-la-Mort chuckled back and brushed away a lock of hair from Theodore’s collarbone before addressing the accusation. (It happened from time to time that the warders didn’t make a fuss for hair length, especially when these coiffures were appreciated by numerous inmates for their resemblance to women’s. The fair Madeleine’s would hold up until the last toilet on his execution day, it was thought.)

“I would rather look at your face than that, I will give you as much.”

Jaques decided Theodore shouldn’t have time to think, and so he laid him on the shabby straw mattress with more care than necessary. Theodore wasn’t fragile. However, he had the nervous movements of a kicked dog, of people who had never been shown consideration: and for this Jaques had the impulse of showering him in it.

He took him like that, with the subsequent discomfort and rhythmic dragging of the chain, but something was amiss to Theodore in a way he couldn’t explain either to himself or to Jaques, because as intent the other was on wrecking his body and using it for his own pleasure, this didn’t look the way lovemaking with women did. Madeleine was used to being a substitute to them, why the nickname otherwise? This was a bizarre, wrongly contextualized act of passion — Jaques reaching down to touch him while he pushed in — and only when Madeleine was inevitably caught up in the sex and just moaned helplessly there, did Jaques place a chaste peck on his jaw. 

Just a kiss, one of those Theodore’s parents or siblings could have given, God rest their souls — in prisoners’ acts of sodomy. As much as that was the last thing he wanted to remember, in a corner of his mind he wished he could have gotten one on the lips. Theodore didn’t manifest this desire to Jaques, of course; only gripped the lumps of his back muscles with a force of will men usually didn’t enjoy during such activities.

Something on that afternoon left a mark on Madeleine much more indelible than the ‘T.F.’ on his shoulder.

*

Jaques Collin slowly became a homogeneous detail of criminal life. At least he should have; there had been so many accomplices, so many crimes, and arrests, and escapes, and all the rest Madeleine got caught up in with an increasing indifference. The day he’d gotten out of Rochefort was a memory of more vivid colours than all the others, but even those tended to wear out over time. He didn’t meet his old cellmate for years to come, and if it hadn’t been for the man’s fame in the Parisian underworld, Madeleine might have forgotten he was ever more than a mirage constructed in his own boredom. 

Maybe it was the backdrop of resentment. The first night they spent free, Trompe-la-Mort had made him genuinely believe he was an escape for Theodore’s life itself, the way he had laughed maliciously at the entirety of French law enforcement for being idiots in his halfhearted — but credible — gendarme disguise. The way he’d squeezed Theodore to his chest and showered him in kisses in the spur of the moment. Entire days had to pass, of sweat and heat and skin-to-skin contact, of petty daytime crimes by the dozens, for the realization to emerge that they were living like lovers. That’s why he resented Collin when he left and didn’t so much as look for Madeleine until his execution day — noble sentiments of love and suffering weren’t fit for the circles they moved in; resentment, however, at least he was familiar with.

*

When they got out of the Conciergerie, after a surprisingly short series of litigations, the two were led to the temporary lodgings provided by the police, two rooms in a motel not much money had been spent on. A salon, it was certainly not — but both men had gone through worse. Theodore walked through Jaques Collin’s door like he had a right to be there. The look he was given was a long and hard one, the first proper one since their reunion.

Madeleine didn’t look like he had aged from his twenty-year-old appearance. Only like he’d expended more of his patience. That, and his sand-blonde hair had been chopped short in the occasion of his untimely impending death.

“How kind have the great powers of the Law been to us,” said Jaques, stretched out against his pillows, “or those of Providence.”

“You forgot you are no longer a sham-abbot.” Theodore pulled out the chair by the miserly writer’s desk for himself. There was a bitter undertone to his voice that indicated he had come for something other than small talk. Jaques took note of such subtleties and paused to let him proceed.

“Five years, you’ve spent with that disguise. You took to that Lucien.  _ Poeta maledetto _ .”

This struck a chord in Jaques that shouldn’t have been. He sat up slightly and the potent, invulnerable engine that was his body was, in the course of seconds, wrecked by so much despondency he couldn’t help but sigh. Though he was aware he would have to adapt to the course his life had taken, his mind hadn’t accepted Lucien’s absence yet. The boy stood there before his eyes, with that crown of golden curls and melancholic air, almost real.

“I loved him. I will not tell you otherwise.”

Madeleine’s next blow was of a cruelty so artful only he would have been capable of it.

“He kept a mistress. I know all about it.”

“A whore,” spat Jaques Collin in response.

“That he favoured above you.”

The glance he cast at Theodore then was of an indescribable anger, but it remained just that — a glance. Collin instead put his temperament on hold and unbuttoned his shirt at the top as though he needed to breathe. He still wore the garments he would have under the priest robe, the entire costume satirically stripped down to its rudimentary remainders. And he tried his best to sound threatening, a theatric that for once fell flat.

“You developed an attitude in the stretches.”

“While you left me to rot, yes, I did.”

Jaques finally made an effort to get up from the shabby bed; it was accompanied with a fittingly dramatic creaking. One of the rare situations that made him helpless — what did in particular was Theodore’s expression, with that miraculous residue of sincere sadness beneath crime and murder and years of imprisonment. It made him appear undeservingly miserable in his ill-fitted shirt. His hair, he noticed, had been cut so badly they had intended to fix it perhaps in the morgue. Jaques took his chin, Theodore twitched the way he always did, and the tension wouldn’t have been interrupted if it weren’t for the kiss. 

Both their lips were too dry. The moment rippled through Madeleine’s bone-weary body and mind with its full impact, to the point where he forgot to breathe and nearly had to cough. As much as he looked like he wanted to pull away, his hand remained still on the other’s face, skin under his fingertips damaged from acid. That was the instance Jaques Collin began to truly feel regretful — and he intended not to let it shine through by pushing Madeleine onto the bed with a bit of ferocity. It was fully reciprocated as well; it would have been difficult to match Trompe-la-Mort’s brawn to the point of tackling him, but the Corsican got closer to doing so than most had.

“But ah, you  _ do _ need me,” said Jaques with a smile as he pried one of Theodore’s hands from his forearm in a half-serious wrestle.

“You only like being needed.” This phrase and the next were separated by another kiss that was mostly teeth and haste. “As the lad did, needed you so badly. Bet he didn’t make so much a fuss.”

Jaques Collin had, by that point, helped him out of most of his clothes. Theodore looked haggard from the sheer strain of prison but his blue eyes betrayed an unbreakable spirit which, upon reflection, felt close to Jaques’s own in a way he couldn’t fully envelop in his influence, and that therefore made him agitated. It misdirected his attention too, enough so that Theodore had succeeded in pinning his colossal form to the sheets by the shoulder. He straddled Trompe-la-Mort like a hero triumphing over a legendary beast.

“And why do  _ you _ have to make a fuss, dear Madeleine?” 

The way Theodore’s fingers clasped his broad chest, auburn hairs bunching between them, was nearly neurotic. His face was clouded over with something desperate and childishly spiteful.

“Because I love you,” his voice cracked in a way he, himself hadn’t expected, “I won’t settle with just needing you, boss.”

No reply came to that other than another series wayward sexual acts, during which Jaques demonstrated no need to continue the discussion. Theodore’s room next door remained vacant for a good portion of the night. And yet what the other thought was still a mystery to him, something he hadn’t been able to disembroil in all the years of knowing him and he most certainly couldn’t after being on death’s door a mere few hours ago.

*

Trompe-la-Mort felt the melancholy for at least years. It was a passing thought, but every time one of Lucien de Rubempre’s works was mentioned or he saw just the right shade of pink that could have been the one of his lips, his heart skipped as if he were stumbling off a precipice. Those images and concepts were all but etched into his mind, and police work — sometimes tedious — didn’t serve as distraction enough to chase them out of there. Not with the type of life he had led before.

Theodore Calvi, too, seldom looked pleased with it. Nursed back to health by a steady life, he had become an exceptionally beautiful young man, but the uniform didn’t look quite right on him. As for his superior, the only reason this wasn’t the case was that  _ Vautrin _ had a way of making any style of clothing fit him naturally; not that Theodore could ever pinpoint how. They would spend their free time in a muted green office, passing Jaques’s cigars back and forth between each other while sharing poignant commentary on their colleagues, which is to say: mostly Bibi-Lupin. When the conversation swerved in a more nostalgic direction, though the good humor still lingered, the words held slightly more weight.

“They nearly had you scragged, who could have said,” said Jaques Collin one of those days, with an amused absence of mind as the smoke he couldn’t be bothered to exhale seeped out his mouth. “A garroter garroted.”

Madeleine recalled that joke more clearly than he wanted to. He was sat on a comfortable padded chair that he did not seem comfortable on at all; for his mannerisms if not else.

“ _ Eppure _ ” he shrugged. “On the other hand,  _ you _ got swindled out of a lot of coin, boss. By Lucien and the moll and the whole merry company.”

“I will hear your dissent forever, my little Theodore, won’t I?” Jaques handed his companion the cigar, a hint of pacific dejection in his voice less turbulent than it formerly would have been.

“Yes,” replied the other as he stood up, opaque sunlight over his lashes, “ _ sempre ti. _ ”

Trompe-la-Mort should have thought it over before feeding a stray dog; that it would follow him around, as rabid as it was.

“ _ Sempre mi _ ,” he said, almost instinctively. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello to the approximately five people in this fandom! I can't write in Balzac's style because I'm not Balzac, so I didn't try. I can, on the other hand, intersperse Italian words in dialogue, considering that I speak the language. Sorry for any possible inaccuracies/typos/missing tags, I usually fix them gradually. My discord is riemann_integrable#0686. Contact me in this quarantine hell if you wish.


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